Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

Via Chris (dig the new layout!) and in turn via Language Hat, a very cool project which jibes very well with the spirit of our own project: Liz Henry is organizing a “Carnival of Blog Translation”:

On the day of the Carnival, a participant translates one post by another blogger, and posts it on her own blog with a link to the original. She would need to email me, or post in the comments right here, and I’ll compile one big post on the day of the Carnival with links to all the participants.

These are clearly our kind of folks! ☺

There is no restriction on topics; I think the aim is to try to get as much cross-language blog flow as possible. I think I myself will try translating something out of Welsh… I would do Brazilian Portuguese but there is as least one participant who will probably be doing Portuguese already: Bev Trayner herself, who first came up with the idea and described it at BlogHer blog.

Bev’s blog, Em Duas Línguas (In Two Languages) has interesting observations on bilingual blogging. This one particularly caught my attention:

…I continue to marvel how navigating the online world em duas línguas is more than the sum of navigating it one of two languages.

We couldn’t agree more.

And we’re hoping that Blogamundo (which will be up and running RSN) will help to approximate this experience across more language pairs than anyone could hope to learn. (Even language nuts!)

We’re planning some features designed to shoulder some of the organizational load of efforts like this. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this project progresses. (I’m also dropping a line about this project to the Global Voices Online mailing list, which has tons of multilingual bloggers.)